


The Alchemist's Snare

by AJHall



Series: The Queen of Gondal [19]
Category: Gondal - Bronte children, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Case Fic, Gen, Historical, Murder Mystery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-30
Updated: 2016-04-30
Packaged: 2018-06-05 12:17:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 17,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6704254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AJHall/pseuds/AJHall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock, benighted at an Angrian country manor while returning from a diplomatic mission, becomes drawn into the dark undercurrents which swirl about the manor's owner, Andre Lemberger, formerly of Salonika, and his extended family. When murder occurs, Sherlock realises that the choice lies between preserving his alias as a traveller in wine and with it the secrecy of his mission, and his own neck.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to my three companions of the five-hour thunderstorm in Hvar Town.

“ _He was again seized with the most violent colliquative pains, headach, shiverings, and great pain over the whole body. His apothecary becoming suspicious that the wine he had drunk might be the cause of the disease, ordered the bottle from which the wine had been decanted, to be brought to him, with a view that he might examine the dregs, if any were left.”_

Excerpt from Accum, Friedrich Christian, 1769–1838: “ _A treatise on adulteration of food, and culinary poisons, exhibiting the fraudulent sophistications of bread, beer, wine, spirituous liquors, tea, oil, pickles, and other articles employed in domestic economy. And methods of detecting them._ ” 

The bridge at Primontel was down; yes, and took two good men with it when it went, and one of them just married at Michaelmas, the pity on it. No telling when it might be rebuilt, either, with things as they were; in the old squire’s day they’d have had a gang on it the moment the weather eased, and no quibbling over cents, but those days were gone and regretting wouldn’t bring them back, would it? The next bridge? A good two leagues downstream, and no-one with any mind to his soul would give oath as to the state of the road there, with the weather since the equinox and the scour from the new channel they’d cut to drain the fields at Santa Caterina having undercut the riverbank nigh on collapse in three or four places. An inn? Not one he’d advise a stranger to trust his purse or his throat to, not since old Mario had sold up and gone to live with his grown-up daughter in town.

Sherlock nodded thanks to the old man, swathed his sodden cloak more firmly around his neck and shoulders and turned his horse’s head back upslope. It would have to be the manor house he had spotted half a league back, its lights twinkling amid the streaming trees. Hard as it was to gauge anything in this god-cursed murk (it would be full dark in less than an hour), it seemed to be a modern-built, squared-off kind of building, aiming for “creditable” rather than “ostentatious”. 

So, probably a retired merchant or minor country squire who farmed his own land and minded his own business and barely had the entrée to aristocratic circles, let alone royal ones. Not someone it was _likely_ would recognise the Crown Prince of Gaaldine. _Likely_ though – could he risk so much on a _likely_?

Another great white-violet flash above the mountain! He counted barely three coronets before the thunder rumbled. The storm was moving closer. The horse, which had borne him so gallantly despite its ewe-neck and goose-rump (he certainly would have to sell it before he dropped his current alias) started at the noise, and slipped on the uneven ground, almost unseating him and jarring his arm and shoulder. His collar-bone, barely healed following that brutal encounter with Melchisdec Hofburg and his deaf-mute bear-keeper, set up a grinding chorus of pain.

His mount’s head had been down, its step plodding, long before the disappointment anent the Primontel bridge. Now it was all Sherlock could do to urge it onwards. Any attempt on the second bridge would be sheer cruelty. The manor it would have to be.

It had put up its shutters against the storm. Hammering at the front door produced nothing; he turned to the old staple of country districts, and tried round the back. Here he managed at least to rouse a dog, which came bounding out, barking ferociously – a performance undercut by the sheer exuberance of its tail-wagging and the affectionate way in which it decided Sherlock was not nearly wet enough, and needed to be licked, forcibly, into shape.

“Barnard! Barnard!” A female voice, and, a moment or so later a female form outlined against a doorway. “What ails you, you silly beast?”

“Far from silly, madam.” 

Sherlock unswathed his head and tried to look pathetic, which proved unexpectedly easy. A north-east wind had sprung up as the storm worsened, and his rain-sodden garments offered almost no protection from it. The dull ache in his shoulder acquired a ragged, jabbing edge.

“He has found a benighted traveller in very sore distress. My name is Altamount; I represent one of the oldest and most respectable wine merchants in Glasstown. I am sent to visit a number of our suppliers in the district, but the Primontel bridge is down, the storm is worsening and I fear my horse is becoming lame. I cannot reach the winery where I hoped to spend tonight. Might I, as the greatest of possible favours, in the name of St Christopher and our Lady, beg hospitality for the night for me and my beast?”

“Oh, but of course –” The woman broke off, and then in a curiously flattened voice continued. “That is – I’m sure my stepmother will be most happy to offer the hospitality of her house. Look, lead your beast in under the canopy and wait a moment while I go and explain –”

There followed a pause of perhaps a quarter of a turn, which Sherlock occupied by loosening the horse’s girths, rubbing it down as best he could with straw, and speculating. A recent remarriage by the manor’s owner, displacing a grown-up daughter who had had long enough for her role as mistress of the house to have worn to a close-fitting garment, not easy to put off. A stepmother, it seemed of some uncertainty of temper and paucity of charity. Hospitality was a sacred duty throughout the three kingdoms; there must be very grave doubts about the stepmother’s character – or, perhaps, the daughter of the house wished to _instil_ such doubts – for her to have answered as she had.

He whistled through his front teeth and, when the horse turned to nuzzle at his chest, found a couple of pieces of dried apple and fed them to it. A bed for the night – or a hay-loft, if the stepmother chose to banish him to the outbuildings – was good enough, but something of a mystery to enliven the hours in prospect would be better yet.

He heard the back door open once more and looked up to see the glow of a lantern. The woman he had seen before emerged from the house, this time accompanied by a grey-haired, limping man in the solid, weathered garments of a respectable outdoor servant. In the lantern light he could see that his saviour was older than he had guessed from her voice. She must be in her thirties, with the kind of strong, bony face which only looked good on a woman when she reached late middle life, by which time few were paying attention.

“Jacopo will take care of your horse,” she said. “Come with me.”

The servant took his horse with an assured calm that told Sherlock all he needed. His pitying glance at the ewe neck confirmed it. A man used to better stables. From some trick of erectness in his bearing and the precision with which he wore his unassuming clothes, Sherlock guessed Jacopo might even have seen service with one of the Angrian cavalry regiments which had been the pride of the three kingdoms, not so very long ago. 

Duke Julius, Sherlock’s father, had been colonel-in-chief of one such regiment. Sherlock would have to be careful round Jacopo. No-one had ever said he _much_ resembled his father, but there were tricks of gait, peculiarities in the formation of ears, quirks of lips and so forth which might start a train of thought. At all costs, no such train must be provoked. His dealings with the Old Man – the one man left in Angria’s Inner Council who perceived where the _true_ danger to the southernmost kingdom lay – would be deemed black treason by the vultures who clustered about the throne of Angria. 

“Come through here,” the woman said, indicating the back door. “We have finished dinner already – we keep early hours in the country – but there is soup, bread and cold meat in the kitchen –”

He said all that was proper. Apart from the need for discretion, he knew these country manors. Especially if the owner were too penurious or miserly to spend out on firewood, the sort who took _not after the first of May or before the first of November_ for Holy Writ, the kitchen would be by far the warmest room in the house. The still-unseen stepmother might have intended it as an insult to a lowly wine merchant’s agent; the sodden Crown Prince took warmth where he found it and was grateful. 

The cook was a tall, badger-haired woman, with rather remarkable cheek-bones and an air of the most exquisite resignation. There was nothing in life, her manner proclaimed, which could surprise or shock, but there remained much which could _disappoint_ her. Chief among such was the presence of a dripping and unheralded traveller in her kitchen.

His best attempts at charm broke on her granite exterior; he opted, instead, for honesty – or, at least, as much as he felt the three kingdoms might withstand. 

“Ma’am, I realise this is a sore imposition for you. Trust me, when the storm stops, and my horse is recovered, I shall be away out of your kitchen and you should never see me again. Take comfort in that, at least.”

She did, at least, in so far as to vouchsafe him the ghost of a smile and, a little later, a plate of steaming soup with a large hunk of bread balanced on its edge.

The soup was indeed something to be grateful for; a fine chicken broth, well-seasoned and fragrant with herbs. Reviving somewhat – had it been two days, or three since he’d eaten last? – Sherlock bowed towards the cook. Her expression softened still further on seeing the sparkling emptiness he had left of his bowl and she moved decisively to the pantry, emerging moments later bearing a plate on which was a well-marbled beefsteak, the size of one of his hands and rather thicker than his thumb. 

“Hot meat’s better than cold, on a night like this,” she said. As if on cue, another great gust rattled the kitchen shutters.

“Indeed, ma’am, and I am greatly in your debt. But – ” Sherlock hesitated, with precisely calculated delicacy. “I would not wish to cause you trouble in your place.”

The cook snorted. “Mistress Naomi won’t mind me giving you this, and her upstairs, the new mistress, won’t be any the wiser and besides, if she is, why should I care anyway, now?”

She pulled an iron skillet down from where it was hanging in the fire alcove, sprinkled it with salt and balanced it on the rack above the coals. She took tongs to render down the steak’s broad rim of rich, yellow fat so she might broil it in its own dripping. Sherlock watched her movements as a fine, abstract display, counterpoint to his thoughts.

Unwanted, unasked extravagance in the kitchen: a storm glass by which to gauge the climate of a household. He had learned that before he was seven years old. He could still hear Genia cry out, on their return from a stay with distant relations, “Summer ortolans, at breakfast! For me and Sherlock, too!” and Grandmama’s sly, inward smile. Their hostess had been found dead in her chambers not three weeks later, leaving her lord free to enjoy her vulgar fortune unencumbered by her vulgar person. He had risen high at Court, not _despite_ the ugly rumours attaching to his name, but _because_ of them. The stars of the aristocratic firmament blazed at the King’s pleasure, and Lord de Rothesay was not the first nor the last to know what it was to have given the King matter to eclipse him in an instant, should Royal favour wane. 

“Master Altamount!” The high, breathless voice close by his ear jolted him from his thoughts; for one disoriented moment he thought he had summoned Genia herself, from across two kingdoms and a gulf deeper than oceans. “Master Altamount!”

He felt a firm hand shake his shoulder. He raised his head from the table on which his plate rested, empty of anything save a thin film of cooled dripping to show where his beefsteak had been. 

The woman who had let him in – Naomi, the cook had called her – was standing by his side, holding a bundle of clothes. Another woman hovered a few feet away, closer to the door. He tensed, watching her. Something familiar there, surely. Only he recalled that firm-jawed, uncompromising face, lightened by a wide, generous mouth and winged with laughter lines, as being a man’s. A brother, perhaps? 

“Jacopo said he thought you were moving awkwardly, and that maybe you’d pulled your shoulder and it could do with looking at?” 

So he had been right to be wary of Jacopo. An old cavalry groom for certain, alert to any injury which might affect a trooper’s ability to hold a horse in a charge and so threaten the unit as a whole.

He nodded, stiffly, and then thought Altamount the wine merchant would have been more gracious. “Thank you. I injured my shoulder in a fall from my horse, two months ago. The wet weather, I fear, has aggravated it.”

“Ah!” The other woman strode forward. “In that case, I may be able to assist.”

“Ma’am?” 

“Oh, don’t be alarmed. I know exactly what I am about. My name is Sarai Benveniste.” 

She said it with the confidence of one without doubt that the name would be recognised. Nor was her confidence misplaced. Even Altamount – especially Altamount, a resident of Glasstown – would have heard of that notorious prodigy, the Female Physician of Salonika. One lord of Angria was rumoured to have offered a farm by way of bribe to the orderly, merely to secure seats for him and his cronies at Sarai Benveniste’s dissections. Subsequently, rumour added, he had offered his whole estate to the lady herself. 

Sherlock wondered, briefly, if Altamount were the conventional sort, who would shrink away in horror at the thought of having a female doctor attend him. Another stabbing pain jolted through his shoulder. No, Altamount would brook being tended by the Devil himself if it promised him an iota of relief from this.

“It _is_ troubling you, isn’t it?” Sarai said, dispassionately, and then, “Ruth, might I ask you to draw the screen across the corner of the kitchen and set a stool?”

The cook obeyed without a breath of affront. Whatever Sarai Benveniste was to this household, she had been it a very long time. Sherlock chewed on that thought while Sarai stripped off his jacket and shirt, tossing them over the screen with instructions to the cook to take them and dry them.

“I daresay sitting in damp things didn’t help your shoulder.” Her hands were surprisingly warm and assured.

“It wasn’t for want of telling, Mistress Sarai,” the cook observed, her voice barely muffled by the carved wooden screen. “But he was away with the fairies. I couldn’t get a word through to him.”

“Pain and exhaustion will do that,” Sarai said. “And chill also. Naomi, that was a good thought of yours about clothes. Ruth, can you heat me oatmeal, and find me some dried lavender?”

With calm competence she made up a hot poultice with the oatmeal and lavender, tied it into a coarse linen bag, and strapped it against Sherlock’s collar-bone. He felt the benefit immediately.

“Ah, good,” Sarai commented, though he had said nothing. Presumably his expression had spoken volumes to the trained eye. “Now, take off those ludicrously wet things, and get changed properly.”

Privacy hardly figured much, for any of the things he was. As Crown Prince, he was surrounded by bodyguards and valets; as commander of his regiments their place was taken by batmen and aides-de-camp and where – as here – he travelled incognito, he took the shocks of the road, inns and scrambled lodgings in stride. Nonetheless, he was not used to a woman telling him to strip, particularly not in a manner as disinterested as it was brisk.

He pictured Mycroft’s reaction and grinned, inwardly. What a pity reasons of state made it imperative no-one link Altamount with Gaaldine. Contriving a meeting between the King of Gaaldine and the Female Physician might be possible, but he could not afford to be seen by Sarai Benveniste at Gaaldine’s court. If he could not witness the meeting, there would be scant point.

He stepped out from behind the screen wearing the meticulously mended cast-offs of a careful, but prosperous, member of the Angrian merchant classes. The breeches were a little loose in the waist and short on the leg, but the overall impression was very passable indeed. And _dry_.

It was not a moment too soon. The door to the kitchen was flung open and two girls aged about ten or eleven tumbled through it, ringlets flying in wild disarray.

“Catherine! Veronica!” Naomi managed to sound both exasperated and unsurprised at the invasion. “What are you doing here? Mind your manners, we have a guest.”

They eyed Sherlock with shy appraisal, but were far too abashed actually to direct any words in his direction.

“ _She_ sent us out,” the taller girl – Veronica? – stated.

“For giggling,” her sister confirmed. 

Both looked so thoroughly chastened as to make it impossible to believe they’d ever had a giggle in them. Sherlock recalled Naomi’s wariness whether her stepmother would extend charity to a traveller caught in a storm. The woman, it seemed, took the same unwelcoming approach to her new family. And such a new family, at that. Fresh beef in the pantry at this time of year bespoke a wedding feast mere days ago. That, or habits of extravagance far beyond anything suggested by the rest of the manor.

His fingers passed over a darned patch on the side of his breeches. Yarn matched to a nicety; stitches neat and even as weaving, perceptible only to touch, not the eye. Care, love, skill, and thrift combined. Naomi, presumably. She was already applying balm to the spirits of her chastened sisters (no: half-sisters, almost certainly) helped out with dried cherries.

Another thunderclap shook the shutters; the little girls jumped at the noise.

“The storm is moving away from us,” Sherlock said. They turned at the sound of his voice. “When you see the lightning flash, count slowly until you hear the thunder. Like this - ‘One co- cormorant, two cormorants’ and so on. The longer the interval, the further away the storm.”

As if on cue the lightning flashed again. The little girls began counting, aloud, and not quite in time with each other. Sarai moved a little closer to him, just as the thunder sounded again. Under cover of its rumble, she murmured, “What a thing it is, to be a stranger, and thus a prophet. We have had the stormiest of autumns, and every storm Naomi has tried to explain that principle of natural philosophy to her sisters, with no discernible success.”

The glint in her eye suggested to Sherlock that the phenomenon of a man’s casual words being taken as gospel, when he was only saying what the woman on the spot had been saying for months, was familiar to the Female Physician of Salonika. He ducked his head in acknowledgement.

“If the opportunity arises, perhaps I may mention to the little girls that their sister is wiser than they give her credit for.”

Sarai looked sardonic. “Someone in this household has to be.”

He raised an eyebrow by way of invitation, but whether she could or would have said more, she was forestalled. The door opened and Jacopo entered. 

“My pardons, all,” he said, “but I am to tell you that the mistress has retired upstairs, and the master would take wine with our guest.”

The glance that passed between Sarai and Naomi told Sherlock all he needed. The master had asserted his authority and the lady, rather than graciously acquiescing, had challenged him, lost, and retired in dudgeon from the field. 

“I should be most honoured,” Sherlock said, and permitted himself to be led away.

The chamber into which he was shown was a heavy, panelled parlour, in the style of a quarter of a century ago, lit by a great hanging brass lamp of Ottoman workmanship in the centre of the ceiling and a few lesser lights set low around the room. The air was heavy with fumes from the burning oil and tinged with a faint, sour odour, like an unaired sickroom.

There were three men present; two seated upon a divan and the third swaddled in rugs, in a padded chair set close to the great masonry stove in the room’s corner. He, unlike the other two, did not rise to greet Sherlock’s arrival. 

The seated man, of course, was the master of the house; there could be no doubt of that; Sherlock had met his daughters and was currently wearing his breeches. Both the men who had risen were younger; the first, apparently in his mid-twenties, garbed as a priest and the other a red-faced country squire in his forties.

All bowed.

“Not a night to be travelling,” the man in the chair wheezed. 

“Indeed not – but I travel not for pleasure, but from duty. My name is Altamount, of Glasstown. I am engaged to visit several vintners in the district, on behalf of the wine house I have the honour to represent.”

A slow smile of satisfaction spread across the master of the house’s face. “Then you are come most opportunely. You see before you Andre Lemberger, once of Salonika but these many years a resident of Angria.” 

“I am honoured to make your acquaintance.” Sherlock bowed once more, and then looked up, enquiringly, at the other two men. Lemberger waved a hand towards the red-faced man.

“Sir Giles Vernon, whose daughter I have lately taken to wed. And this whey-faced fellow in black is my chaplain, Master Buccafusca.”

The cleric was indeed pale, with a waxy sheen to his skin. That, together with his high-bridged Roman nose gave him something of the air of a Medici in an old portrait. Nevertheless, the flash in his dark, arrogant eyes – likewise those of a Florentine noble from the great years – suggested he did not care to have the subject remarked on, even by his employer.

Those eyes lingered just a little too long on Sherlock’s face, then flicked away self-consciously.

Altamount the agent of a Glasstown wine-merchant might have been too inexperienced to interpret the signs. The Crown Prince had no such excuse. What was this household? A convert affecting his own chaplain was odd enough, but to engage such a one? He was too bold, too indiscreet not to have attracted adverse notice within the Church. Lemberger, surely, must have known it. Was Master Buccafusca’s appointment intended as a challenge, and, if so, to whom?

Lemberger was watching them both, a curious smile on those thin lips. More going on here than met the eye, and Lemberger was evidently no fool. Best to root out suspicion before it had chance to grow.

Sherlock smiled ingenuously at his host.

“You said, ‘Most opportunely’, sir. For me, most certainly – I doubt my horse could have managed another mile. But for you? Are your cellars perchance in need of restocking? I am authorised to offer most advantageous discounts – I am given wide discretion by my principals –”

Lemberger’s manner relaxed, subtly. “Rather the reverse, Master Altamount. Did I not mention I am lately married? My wife’s dowry included a vineyard. Sir Giles gave us a tertian of its best vintage to celebrate the feast, and we have much of it still to drink. All wine tastes like vinegar to me, these days, but I would welcome the views of an expert.” 

He raised his own lead-crystal goblet – the finest Bohemian work, if Sherlock were any judge – and twirled it around so that the great Ottoman lantern caused the liquid in the glass to glow a sumptuous ruby.

Asking a professional about the quality of wine given as a bride gift, in the presence of the giver? Sherlock allowed a slightly questioning note into his voice as he made the expected response, that he would be happy to lend his poor skills to his host’s advantage. Lemberger, as he had half expected, answered the tone, rather than his words.

“I feel in justice I should mention these late years have been lean ones in these parts. Between war, pestilence and the lure of the towns we have few labourers left, and those few command a high price for their hire. Sir Giles – I am sure so near a kinsman as he now is will forgive my mentioning it – inherited a much reduced patrimony and is ill-placed to bid for the services of a skilled workforce. I collect there is much to do with pruning and grafting and the like before the vineyard yields as it used in its glory days.”

Sir Giles reddened. “We should do as they do in the lands of the Emperor.”

Bind the labourers in perpetual servitude to the estate on which they were born, he meant. Years ago, now, in Russia Sherlock had witnessed the aftermath of a serf revolt which had seen an estate owner torn apart by those who – having been treated like animals for generations – had turned wolfish indeed. He would have wagered half the royal treasury Sir Giles had not.

Fortunately, before he was called upon to make any comment, the servitor appeared at his elbow with a full glass of wine: plain, thick, green glass with a tiny bowl, twin to those held by Master Buccafusca and Sir Giles. Crystal, it seemed, was a privilege reserved to the master of the house.

He raised his glass first to his host, then to his lips.

It took every breath of self-restraint he possessed not to spit it straight out again.

In his travels, Sherlock had drunk sour wine, watered wine, rough wine: wine contaminated by filthy vessels or whose colour or clarity had been “improved” by everything from dried bilberries to the husks of hazelnuts.

He had not to his knowledge ever tasted a drink so noxious. Worse: a drink so many of whose noxious qualities were _pre-meditated_.

Left to the crude ministrations of the estate’s winemakers, the beverage would still have been thin and acidic, product of poor soil which had had neither science nor attention directed to its improvement. Doubtless, it would still have been stored in barrels clumsily made from green staves. Those barrels might still have been crammed into unwholesome warehouses, ill-protected from extremes of heat, cold or damp.

It could never have been good wine, or even passable wine. Left to itself, it might have succeeded in being honestly bad.

The makers of this brew had eschewed honesty.

Sherlock recalled Master Lemberger’s crystal glass shining ruby in the light. Adulterated with logwood bark from the Americas, the tree the Indians called ‘bloodwood’. As for the source of its exceptional clarity – the wine possessed a unholy sweetness, coupled with a metallic aftertaste. Sugar of lead for a certainty, along with what other toxic matter Sherlock, deprived of his experimental bench and his reagents, could only guess. 

He swirled his glass gently, watching the ardent spirit run down its side in sluggish trails. Again, not a strength achieved by nature or even honest artifice.

He raised his head to find Lemberger looking at him. 

“Well, Master Altamount? Your verdict?” 

“I have cannot recall when I have ever tasted a wine like it,” Sherlock said, with careful precision. There was a flicker – no more than that – across the face of the old man. 

“So would you recommend I invest my store in improving the vineyard?”

Sherlock had seen too much of man’s ingenuity when it came to evil to lend credence to omens, presentiments or the like. The words which sprang to mind – “No. Burn the vines where they stand. Plough their ashes into the soil. Let it lie fallow forever, and throw it open to all who choose to pasture their beasts there. That is a potter’s field: ill-omened land” – must be the product of his own wearied mind, acting on the tensions he’d already detected within this house.

Nevertheless, he must say something. What, though? While he was under Lemberger’s protection within the manor, when he travelled next day he would doubtless be crossing Sir Giles Vernon’s land. A man who praised serfdom would have few if any qualms in striking down a humble wine-merchant’s agent if he fancied he had received insult.

“These are poor times for small vineyards, even those with an already established reputation,” he said, after a pause which might do for thought. “Consolidation is everything and the large growers do all they can to drive the smaller to the wall. Many have sold up, or turned distillers of rakia instead.”

Lemberger leaned forwards. “Distilling rakia, eh? An outlet for your talents, Master Buccafusca. You were once, they tell me, a master of the alchemical arts.”

Sherlock’s attention sharpened. Beer, wine and even brandy-making were perfectly consistent with a religious vocation, but Lemberger had hinted at more than that.

The cleric’s face clouded. “Sir, I know not how you came by your information, but I can assure you that you refer to a period of youthful foolishness, before I, by the grace of God, turned to a better path. Let us speak no more of it. There is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, is there not?”

Lemberger seemed sunk in thought, shrunken back amid the rugs. After a short while he muttered, as if to himself, “Repentance? It goes to weak heads like kif. I met a man once who claimed he was the Messiah. Got half Europe believing him. I wager, Master Buccafusca, you’d have overfilled your belly on repentance had you lived through those times.”

The chaplain tensed in his seat and Lemberger smiled; the jab had been intended, then.

Sherlock’s senses quickened. This household, with its undercurrents and unspoken resentments, was beginning to intrigue him, his host most of all.

Lemberger’s eldest daughter bore a Jewish name, the two younger those of Christian saints. And between the birth of Naomi and those of Catherine and Veronica had come the Shabtai Zvi affair. 

It had touched very near on the three kingdoms. There had been riots, Sherlock recalled, and women prophesying in the streets, their hair unbound and streaming. Grandfather himself had tried to summon the so-called Messiah to Court, only to find himself outbid by the Sultan. Eleven-year old Sherlock had been in two minds whether to enjoy Grandfather’s unfamiliar defeat or regret losing the chance to see, face to face, a man capable of perpetrating so bare-faced and extravagant a blasphemy.

Two decades later, Sherlock knew his own mind better. “Ah? And how did you find him?” 

“Very good for business.” Lemberger’s guffaw at his own joke ended in a fit of great rasping coughs. Unbidden, the servant strode forwards from his corner in the shadows, linen cloth in hand, screening his master’s face from the other men. 

Sherlock risked a sidelong glance at Sir Giles. The lamp burnt low; in the dim light it was possible to discern little. Still, he did not think concern uppermost on his face. The chaplain’s prim, narrow lips moved, possibly in prayer.

Lemberger wheezed himself to a standstill. The servant stepped aside with a practised ease which told Sherlock this scene had happened numerous times before.

“Sir?” Sherlock enquired.

Lemberger’s eyes streamed; his face was mottled purple. “Eh? Men with their sights set on the world to come don’t pay attention to the bargain they’re driving in the one they live in.” He spat, accurately, into the fireplace and wiped his lips on the cloth. “And when they’ve lost all hope they’re even less likely to pay attention.”

“Unless, perhaps, sir, they come to believe that the world is all, and that though things of the spirit fail them, gold does not die or tarnish?” A gage thrown down onto the playing board, but Sherlock thought he had read his man aright.

“A man of perception. Tell me, which house is it in Glasstown you represent, Master Altamount?”

Five years work had gone into Altamount. In the unlikely event anyone chose to cross-check, his identity could be verified down to salary entries in ledgers and a long and rather petulant correspondence about a lame mule. He named _Fratres_ Ferdinand & Ferdinand as his employer, and was amused to see Lemberger lift an eyebrow. Sir Giles remained oblivious; given the wine he had presented as a wedding gift, it would have been more surprising had he recognised Angria’s premier wine house. 

“And I doubt not you do them credit, and are in good case to rise?” Lemberger enquired.

Spoken like a true father of three unmarried daughters. How truly absurd, when Sherlock had volunteered for this task expressly to _avoid_ more matrimonial manoeuvrings on the Council’s part!

Before Sherlock could answer, another coughing fit overtook Lemberger. When he was somewhat recovered, he waved a hand. “Enough. I am weary and would to bed. You too, if I read you right. We will speak more in the morning. But you come most happily. Of late, my sight grows dim. It’s hard making ledgers balance if you can’t see to add the columns, and all my household see Pacioli’s principles as the darkest of dark arts. Your counsel would be greatly valued.”

“Nothing would give me more pleasure, sir,” Sherlock said, and almost meant it. Absurd, how profound was his relief at realising that Lemberger viewed him as a source of trained commercial expertise, rather than as a potential son-in law.

“Until tomorrow, then.” Helped by the servitor, Lemberger rose to his feet. 

The sallow-faced cleric had also risen from his place on the divan. “Sir, if you would be so good, please could you convey this book of devotions to your lady? She left it in the chapel, and I have only just now remembered it.”

Lemberger took the book, nodded to the assembled company, and – despite his visible frailty – swept from the room, leaving them with a sense of something lacking, as if a light had gone out. 

A servant with a taper led Sherlock to his chamber in a remote wing of the manor. Every room through which they passed was ornately furnished, albeit in a curiously mismatched style, as if Lemberger had simply accrued possessions over the years, perhaps as unclaimed pledges or out of foreclosed estates. 

With the grateful sigh of the profoundly weary, Sherlock extinguished his light and clambered into bed, sparing a charitable thought to whoever had had the forethought to slide a warming pan between his sheets.


	2. Chapter 2

The tap on his door caught Sherlock – comically, he thought later – unprepared. Such absurdities happened at Court or on progress. Even when he was incognito, approaches happened with tedious frequency. But here? He hardly thought Naomi was the type, still less the cook, and even if he’d guessed right about the chaplain, so bold a stroke seemed improbable in the extreme.

He sidled noiselessly towards the sound.

“Who is it?” he breathed through the keyhole. 

“May I speak with you? I would not trouble your rest, save on a matter of most signal urgency.” 

Even in a whisper, he recognised the voice. Sarai Benveniste. Thoroughly intrigued, Sherlock eased the door open. She slid through the gap as soon as it was wide enough to admit her. Once inside, she doused the taper she had shielded in her hand, lest any light penetrate through to the outside.

She did not raise her voice, even now the door was shut. He had to strain to hear. 

“I know who you truly are. And it is with him I must speak.”

Sherlock led the way to the bed, murmured, “For discretion, purely,” and parted the bed hangings to allow Sarai to scramble in, then followed her. The thick curtains blocked sound and draughts alike; they were able to converse at a less strained volume.

“May I ask what you mean?” Misunderstanding seemed unlikely, but there was too much at stake to take any shadow of a chance.

“Please, your grace, we cannot waste time pretending to misunderstand each other. Some considerable time ago – you will know exactly when I mean – you attended an anatomical lecture in Amsterdam. A dissection of a convicted criminal. The dissection revealed an abnormal growth on the subject’s liver, among much other matter of interest.”

“I recall it.” His voice hardened. “What I do not recall is your being present.”

Even in the dark, he could tell Sarai was smiling. “I shall take that as a compliment, from a man I have myself seen to be a master of disguise.”

“Hardly a master, given you recognised me.” Sherlock hoped that didn’t sound petulant. But to have been recognised at all meant he was teetering on the edge of disaster. 

“I had advantages. Not just seeing you undisguised (save for air and voice) but in special knowledge. There is an assassin’s weapon, peculiar to a certain sect of Wallachians. It leaves a most distinctive scar: such a one as you bear below your left shoulder blade. However ferociously rivalries run in the Angrian wine trade, it seems unlikely anyone would spend coined silver hiring a foreign assassin to see off Master Altamount of Glasstown.”

“A generous opinion, and one I fear does the trade more credit than it deserves.” His voice hardened. “But your knowledge of weaponry is commendable. How came you by it?”

“My knowledge, your grace, was gained in the theatre of war. I was the youngest of seven daughters – my eldest sister became Andre Lemberger’s wife before I was born. My parents had no surviving sons. So, since I had no particular desire to follow my sisters into matrimony, my father was more than happy to train me in his own profession. But only up to a point. On his death, I learned he had left his practice to my second sister’s husband. A reasonable precaution, from one perspective. My apprenticeship was not yet over and my sister’s husband was a physician of growing repute. What more reasonable than that he should continue guiding me as my father had done?”

Her tone could have stripped varnish.

“It did not answer?”

“It did not.” 

He almost expected her to end there, but after a moment she added, “It became impossible for me to remain in Salonika. I disguised myself as a man – it had served when I was younger, and wanted to attend public dissections and the like, from which women were barred – and crossed into Gondal. And there –” her voice went up in remembered amusement “– There I happened upon the surgeon-general of Gondal’s armies, who was barely fooled for a quarter of a turn by my disguise but, being desperately short of field surgeons, was more than willing to take me on as I was. I learned fast, and I learned well. Necessity is most truly the _best_ of tutors.” 

“Gondal,” he said flatly, his mind racing. “How long ago?” 

“A decade?” He felt, rather than saw, her shrug. “Perhaps a little more.”

Ten years. Of course. When else could it have been?

“Then you will have been at Vannstown?” 

Had he betrayed himself? But no; there were tens of thousands of reasons he might have asked that particular question with that particular emphasis. Someone might sift through each possibility, like a man sifting the sand on a beach, before happening upon _that_ answer.

“I arrived with the relief force. I wasn’t one of the Forty.”

Despite his dry mouth, Sherlock contrived a tolerable imitation of dispassion. “I understand the relief force found much to occupy itself with, nonetheless.”

Sarai’s tone reflected his own dark humour. “You could say that, indeed. In my case, the more so because our surgeon-general had received a near-mortal wound when the garrison abandoned the citadel. In addition to having his duties to attend to, his care fell to my lot. And when he rallied at last and started to regain strength, enteric fever swept through the camp and he succumbed. I thought I’d lost him twice over.”

Sherlock thanked the Virgin his shaking hands were concealed from Sarai’s view. His heart pounded. 

“Your skill is to be commended.” He paused, calculating. Men in fever talked, not usually coherently. Names, though – names might stick. Best to conceal the truth below a show of candour.

“I had the privilege to know him, a little, when I was a hostage in Gondal as a boy. You could hardly have saved a better man.”

Amusement rippled through Sarai’s voice. “I understand the Queen was quite of your opinion. She was distraught how her favourite had suffered in her service. I doubt she would have allowed him back in the field, even had his health permitted.”

Coming like that, unheralded, out of the confiding dark, it was a blow to the heart. He curled around himself to smother the pain, and was only glad Sarai could not see him so.

Her voice was slow and mediative. “But Vannstown saw the end of me, too, as a physician under arms.” 

“Why so?” To his credit, he sounded calm, almost to the point of indifference.

“Whatever I’d contrived on the battlefield, a score of jealous voices shouted it down. _She wasn’t there at all._ Or: _If she were, then t’was to the shame of Christendom_ As if I cared for Christendom! Oh, and, _She was the surgeon-general’s mistress; nothing more. She stole his credit._ Nonsense, the lot of it, but with my patron laid up, weak as a kitten, and Gondal hot with fire against all foreigners, what hope had I? I bethought me of my kin in Angria, and took the southern road. This house proved a haven to me. I am sorry you see it now in stormy weather.”

Even though Sherlock could still hear the shutters banging, he did not mistake Sarai’s comment for literalism. 

“Is that what brings you here? ‘Stormy weather’?”

“Yes.” After a short pause, she went on, “I am deeply concerned about the health of my brother.”

So she still thought of Lemberger as a brother, notwithstanding her sister’s death, his conversion from the faith of their fathers, physical distance and the two remarriages. Something twisted painfully in his chest. 

“Indeed, he does not seem to be a well man.”

“No. He does not. And yet –” Sarai hesitated. “And yet he was hale three months ago, and I find it hard to attribute a physical cause to his decline. Tell me – for I have heard that this is an interest of yours – if I were to say, ‘poison’ what would first come to your mind?”

Jesu! What a serpent’s nest to stumble into! But that was the countryside all over. Smiling and beautiful on the outside, but the lowest and vilest alleys of any capital of Europe could not present a more dreadful record of crime.

Beneath that thought came another sensation: a curious ease. He had guessed right about this house from the first.

Furthermore, Sarai Benveniste intrigued him. No, be honest for once. Her connection to John Watson provoked envy, sharp as a knife in the gut. To have learnt from him, to have shared his danger in the field, to have saved his life –

How could this woman have had everything he could ever have wished for, and be so unaware of her riches?

From the sly allusion to the Queen it was clear Sarai had not the smallest suspicion of his own interest (Unless she knew all and was a cleverer dissembler than all the courtiers he had ever met? Men in fever talked; enteric was notorious for it. Ha! More interesting yet, if so.) But, if thrown together in a common task, more would emerge. Anecdotes of life in the field, each a hidden jewel waiting to be picked up and polished. Borrowed surgical knacks, familiar motions of wrist or finger. Perhaps they even corresponded. 

He stretched full length on the bed, the clockwork of his mind clicking and whirring. His orders were to press on for Gaaldine with all speed, but there was too much here to tempt him to linger. Surely, for the health of his horse and to let the storm-swollen rivers to subside, he could afford to spend another day on the problem? Leaving aside Sarai Benveniste and Lemberger himself, surely none of the household possessed enough wit to devise a scheme which it would take him longer than 24 turns to unravel? 

Poison. Used over months, so a cumulative toxin. Such as one of the metallic poisons.

“How are his gums?” Sherlock enquired.

There was a grim note in Sarai Benveniste’s voice. “Yes – I fancy there is a bluish line there. But given Sir Giles’ wedding gift –”

She left the sentence hanging, but Sherlock completed the thought. “Hard to tell, is it not, if lead poisoning is accident or design, in those circumstances?”

“I trust my brother not to drink rashly of that or any other brew. But I would be happier if Sir Giles were out of this house, and his wine with him.”

Sherlock noted Sarai’s not-quite nailing of her colours to the mast in the manner of her chief suspect. Unless, of course, that were a personal judgment, unconnected to any thoughts of crime. Sir Giles, he rather fancied, might not be too nice in his judgements with respect to an unmarried female relative of the house, her reputation already put into the balance by rash adventuring onto the public stage.

“There are other slow poisons,” he observed. 

“There are indeed. But why –?”

Her words were cut short by a piercing scream. Then another. Then another.

Sherlock was out of bed, reaching from his clothing. “I will tap on the door when the coast is clear.”

He did not look back to see if she was following him once he had given the signal, but he was confident that she was there, hanging back a little into the shadows so as not to arrive too suspiciously close on his heels.

The noise guided him through the maze of upstairs rooms to one which could only be the master bedroom. The intricately carved wooden door was flung wide, and the chamber within blazed with lights; beeswax candles, not rush dips. 

Sherlock saw Lemberger, his face contorted into a rictus, thrashing on agony on the bed, his back arching as he convulsed. By his bed a very young woman with long tousled blonde hair in plaits grasped his hand and screamed. It seemed to Sherlock that Lemberger’s convulsions became more intense at each scream. 

She raised her eyes as Sherlock entered, and her face changed. “You! how _dare_ you come in here?”

“My lady, I heard you cry out for assistance.” He took two steps nearer the bed. Even the slight vibration of his steps seemed reflected in the rhythm of Lemberger’s agonies; his suspicion about the effect of sound intensified. “Tell me where I may find the physician.”

“I am here.” He had not heard Sarai come in; he stepped back to let her approach the bed.

Shockingly, the blonde girl turned from her sick husband and spat, accurately but feebly, at Sarai. The gob of spittle landed a couple of paces short. “That whore? That unnatural creature? I’ll not have her touch my husband –”

“Suh- suh - ister,” the man on the bed gasped, and convulsed again.

“What’s that, my dearest?” His wife dropped to her knees beside the bed, seeking to cradle his head in her arms.

“He says,” Sherlock observed, “that Sarai Benveniste is his sister. More to the point, she’s probably the only physician this side of the Primontel bridge, and that bridge is down.”

He might have said more, but Sarai “sshed” him decisively, moving to the bedside and gripping the girl’s shoulder.

“Marie, stop being absurd. Master Altamount, pray find Jacopo. We must bleed my brother at once and it will take both of you to hold him while we do.”

In a swirl of white lawn, Marie Lemberger rose to her feet. “I shall go to papa.” 

There was a brilliantly-dyed Turkey shawl cast carelessly across the low table by the bed; she swept it up but did not immediately swathe her shoulders in it, holding it instead between both hands and staring down at it as if for a moment she wondered what it was, and why it had come there.

Conscious, even in this extremity, of the need to maintain Altamount, Sherlock stepped towards her, gesturing at the shawl. “Ma’am, allow me. You must not take chill.”

At his approach, Marie squealed. She caught up the shawl in both hands, clutching it beneath her chin – absurdly, Sherlock was reminded of a squirrel protecting a nut – and scurried from the room.

At her departure, Sarai sighed. “Now she’s off to persuade Sir Giles to find another physician. But he can hardly repair the Primontel bridge for her; had he that ability, we can confide he would have done so during the five years his tenants have been complaining of its condition.”

An extraordinary sound came from the bed. Lemberger was laughing; a thin, feeble sound cut short as yet another paroxysm assailed him. Still, what a quality in a man, to attempt to find humour even in such extremity. So much would be lost, if Lemberger died this night. 

Jacopo was already in the kitchen, fully dressed (did the man never sleep?) and exchanging low-voiced comments with the cook, who was blowing the fire to wakefulness with the tense wariness Sherlock associated with battery captains on the cusp of an engagement.

The next two turns proved the cook had the right of it. Like any battle Sherlock had known, all sense of any wider purpose – let alone an over-arching strategy – was lost in the first moments. Blood spattered them all (cupping a man in convulsions, even with an expert hand, was no sinecure). The screaming of the anguished Lemberger, the stench as he voided bladder and bowels: these, too, were familiar from the field of war.

And, as in war, long before any of the combatants openly acknowledged the fact, the balance turned against them, so that they already knew themselves defeated before they had ceded more than a foot of ground. Had it been so for the Forty in the Vannstown heights?

Pale dawn leaked into the room. With one final convulsion, so violent it would have thrown him clean off the bed had Sherlock and Jacopo not held him down, Lemberger gave up his life. 

In the sudden silence Sir Giles’s voice could be heard, clear and cold.

“I am the magistrate of this district. I require this to be examined. All of you are confined here under my authority. I will know why my daughter is a widow.”


	3. Chapter 3

Sir Giles was in his element.

A crowd of ill-dressed country-folk – doubtless his tenant farmers and their labourers – crowded the manor’s main hall to overflowing, thronged the doorways so thick the doors could not be closed and clung onto the outside windowsills for a glimpse of what might be passing within. The storm had blown itself out, and a hot sun blazed down outside, bringing the heat and stuffiness and smell of unwashed bodies in the hall almost to smothering point.

Sir Giles had commandeered Lemberger’s chair of state and counting house table and sat upon a dais hurriedly run up out of unseasoned timber. The tang of resin added to the other smells in the hall. Sherlock felt his head beginning to swim. The stupid, so much stupid concentrated here, while Lemberger’s body, locked out of sight in some remote pantry, confided any secrets it might hold to the empty air and watched them blow away on the wind.

He heard Jacopo call his name and looked up to see Sir Giles beckoning him towards the greasy square of stone floor immediately below the dais.

“So we here have a Master Altamount, hired traveller for a firm of wine merchants, of Glasstown.” The emphasis Sir Giles place on “hired” on “wine” and, perhaps most of all, on “Glasstown” gave the ill-dressed yokels their cue. They brayed contempt, pawing at Sherlock’s body as he passed through the crowd, prodding him the ribs and making loud and ribald speculations on his preferences in bed partners and what they chose to do to him. He endured it in silence, reached the appointed place and turned his face up towards Sir Giles with an air of puzzled, well-meaning enquiry.

“The matter is plain. Master Altamount, I have found you out. You did not come here by chance; you came as a welcome and invited guest.”

“Sir, you are mistaken.”

“Am I so?” A smile of low cunning crept across his interlocutor’s face. “My daughter is not the dolt at housekeeping Lemberger’s daughters would like to think her. Since her betrothal she has had an eye to that cook. Who knows what rituals she and the eldest of that brood cook up together on their so-called Holy Days, or what unclean bread passes their lips on those feasts?”

Prolonged contact with dull minds was like keeping steel wrapped in damp wool. Sherlock did not, for a crucial second, collect the significance of Sir Giles’s reference to the cook. Then he heard the word _steak_ and saw – too late – his danger.

“Can we seriously believe that a domestic servant would prepare one of the finest cuts of meat for a chance-come stranger, of no rank or pedigree?”

The audience howled appreciation of this insight. Encouraged, Sir Giles pointed at Sarai, standing next to Naomi on the far side of the room.

“Admit it, harlot. This Altamount has long been your paramour and came here at your bidding. And we know why. We have all heard the attorney read Master Lemberger’s Will.”

Indeed they had. Sherlock had stood, his face an impassive mask, appreciating both the subtlety of Lemberger’s dispositions and their impact upon the widow, whose heavy black veil could not disguise the stiffening of her body as each measured legal phrase sank home.

Under the Will, Marie Lemberger was assured of the return of her dowry, intact and in full. From Marie’s barely contained jerk of anger Sherlock knew that bequest to be double-edged; Sir Giles had doubtless volunteered as little by way of dowry as would suffice to make the match. Furthermore, most of the dowry no doubt remained in Sir Giles’ coffers or, more probably, in the clutches of his creditors. Countless feuds in the wilder parts of the three kingdoms had their roots in dowry instalments remaining unpaid long after the blushing brides had become grey-haired grandmothers.

When it came to his own fortune (substantial, if the attorney’s hushed tone were anything to go by), Lemberger had preferred his children to his wife. 

Should there be no living issue of the marriage, or should Marie bear only daughters, the manor was to be sold, with half to the widow and half divided between the girls. Lemberger’s personal property was to be split between all his daughters in equal shares, Naomi acting guardian for Catherine and Veronica until their marriages or majority and Marie for her own daughters, if any.

A son, though, would take the manor in its entirety on achieving his majority, his mother acting as his guardian and enjoying rights of usufruct over the estate in the interim. A son too, would take the lion’s share of Lemberger’s other wealth.

Had Marie or her father known of the Will’s terms, it would be strong proof of their innocence in the matter of Lemberger’s death. Sherlock, though, would have wagered substantial sums that Lemberger would have died rather than allow such personal information to be shared with his neighbours.

Would have died? _Had_ he died for that reason? Sherlock was so wrapped up in speculation that Sir Giles had to slap his palm down on the table, hard, to attract his notice.

“Master Altamount, dumb insolence will not serve. As I said, I have found you out. You came here at the bidding of Sarai Benveniste. The pair of you planned to remove Master Lemberger and take possession of his money, through a sham marriage on your part to the principal heir. By her age, I daresay that horse-faced daughter of his would jump at any man who feigned suit to her, however mean his condition.”

“Sir, are you completely mad?” Out of the tail of his eye Sherlock caught Sarai’s look of mute horror, and Naomi making frantic gestures but it was too late. Altamount’s automatic championing of a lady in distress and the Crown Prince’s loathing of woolly-minded illogic had combined to bring forth a monster. 

Sir Giles leant forward, his face purpling with rage. “Enough! You are condemned out of your own mouth. The pair of you will hang tomorrow.”

A host of protests rushed to Sherlock’s tongue – and stayed there. Had he not sat over endless thimbles of coffee, discussing in the dispassionate tones of gentlemen how well his brother’s institution of centralised criminal justice, applied by circulating tiers of King’s justices on the English model was succeeding north of the border? Yet the Old Man himself had replied, “It may answer in Gaaldine; the old wolf had fifty years breaking the ground before it was your brother’s turn to sow the seeds. Angria’s soil is very different. It has had no such prior husbandry. It is nourished by the blood spilt in feuds; its mandrakes thrive beneath the roadside gibbets erected by the lords of each petty domain as manifest of their authority. Such a people will not lightly surrender their power of life and death to any royal authority.”

A black-robed figure – Master Buccafusca, his skin looking waxier than ever in the thick air of the hall – took two steps up to the dais and bent to whisper in Sir Giles’s ear. The latter raised his head.

“I am reminded that tomorrow is the feast of St Quodvultdeus and the day after is Sunday. No matter. We will hold them confined until Monday, and hang them at dawn on that day. Have it proclaimed from the pulpits. Also, take note. I’ll hold no man nor women at fault for being late to their duties on Monday should they choose to witness how we requite those who abuse ties of hospitality and kinship in these parts. Case closed.”


	4. Chapter 4

No light leaked through the cellar door. Small wonder; it must be three finger-breadths thick, oak bound with iron. Sherlock sensed the presence of barrels, hogsheads and demijohns by smell first, confirmed by touch. The air was heavy with a sharp, yeasty aroma, tinged with the metallic, sickly taint he had tasted the previous night. Sir Giles’ gift had been put to the front of the cellar, perhaps in the hope that any servant hoping to pilfer from the barrels might receive his just deserts.

“At least, we are unlikely to occupy the time by drinking ourselves senseless on _this_ wine.” 

Sherlock’s voice sounded louder than he had intended, but only a battlefield shout would pierce that door.

“It might come to that, eventually.” 

Despite her efforts to control it, Sarai’s voice wobbled. It did, indeed, seem unlikely that Sir Giles would send them any better cheer to smooth their passage to the gallows – assuming, that is, that wiser counsels did not prevail or Sherlock thought of a plan of escape in the meantime. Wagering their lives on Sir Giles’s reasoning capability or on breaking out of a wine cellar without tools or light to guide them was a bet at longer odds than Sherlock normally favoured. That meant there was one more thing he would have to make clear.

“My presence here in Angria – the communications between Gaaldine and certain people high in the councils of King Adrian – these must not be known. _At whatever cost_. You do realise what I am telling you?” 

If Sarai Benveniste would not consent to going silent to the gallows on this absurdity of a charge, it would be his duty to stop her voice himself. He flexed his hands surreptitiously. It might be a better death than the botched effort of a backcountry hangman, at that. Though he could not imagine meeting Naomi’s eyes, after. As for John, who had been her friend, teacher and who knew what else, he thanked the Virgin (irony upon irony!) that he would never have to know how John took the news of Sarai’s murder at the hands of a villainous wine merchant, should the word filter north to Gondal. Nor, if Mycroft did his job, would Altamount ever be linked to the Crown Prince who would so unaccountably have vanished from the face of the earth.

Sarai’s voice was hesitant, questioning in the chill dark of the cellar. “Forgive me; I am a foreigner and this is no business of mine. But, with a foreigner’s eye, I can see that the three kingdoms are brothers born of the same mother. Why, then, this incessant strife between you?”

Sherlock snorted. “Youngest of seven girls, you said? If you’d ever had brothers, you’d not ask the question.”

“If, sir, you mean to imply that girls do _not_ fight with their sisters, I can only commend you on having led so sheltered a life.”

The dry note in her voice reassured and warmed him. No feigned attack would be required. She understood.

“Hardly that – but do go on. I find it strangely interesting.” That was truer than Sarai could know. He sensed a trailing end. If he could but find it and pull, it would lead him to unravel this mess. 

And that end lay within Sarai’s tales of sisterly rivalry. He was sure of it.

“Isn’t it obvious? After all, what do most of these sibling quarrels come down to but ‘Papa loves me the best’? Yet when it comes to sisters - well, even children such as Catherine and Veronica know that their papa will always value a boy more than a girl. They do not have to read a Will; they learn it in their cradles. So their fights are doomed to be inconclusive. They can aspire to be _better_ beloved; never _best_.”

“Ah!” He sat up and snapped his fingers. “ _There_. Was your brother _so_ set on a son?”

“There is the Will. Also, he married three times.” Sarai hesitated, then added, “I have known Marie since she was a child – in understanding, to be honest, I hardly believe she has advanced much. Barring the lucky intervention of a third party on one side or the other, my brother’s union with Sir Giles’ daughter has – to me at least – seemed inevitable for some years past. The families have always been such _close_ neighbours.”

“As I suspected. Marie Vernon’s chief charm was that of geography.”

“What a way of expressing it!”

“Forgive me, but I am a prince of the blood. What other mode of wooing would you expect me to recognise?”

 _That_ provoked an amused “huff” from Sarai; sufficient encouragement to allow Sherlock to expand his thesis. 

“Sir Giles is the riparian landowner. Both banks, given the Primontel bridge falls within his sole, if neglectful care. I glimpsed a mill downstream. Every ear of grain from these lands must be ground at Sir Giles’s mill and pay his tithes. Sir Giles does not sound like the kind of man who would sacrifice short-term gain to long-term improvement. The tithes, doubtless, make the cultivation of grain in these parts a barely-paying proposition.”

“I have heard my brother’s complaints on that head for many years.” Sarai sounded rueful. “On that side at least it was a prudential match. But I do not think Sir Giles would have consented to leave his whole estate to Marie unless he saw it passing through her to the next generation. He would not risk his estate ending in the hands of we –”

She broke off, so whatever epithet she had been planning to use was lost. No matter. Whether they belonged to the petty squirearchy or to the high aristocracy, men of Sir Giles’s type bore little love for Jews, even those, like Lemberger, who converted. Which would have provided an interesting motive for the murder, had Lemberger’s untimely death happened after Marie had borne him a couple of sons – 

Abruptly, he saw the solution, rolled out bright and shining, like a chain of silver just delivered from the Palace goldsmiths. It only remained to test each link.

“Nux Vomica is one of the bitterest of substances. Master Lemberger could not but have detected it. _Even_ though he complained that the power of taste and smell had deserted him of late. So, Mistress Physician, how would you have contrived for him to swallow it?”

There was a note of dawning realisation in Sarai’s voice. “Short of force – which was self-evidently _not_ used – there is only one possibility. He took it in the form of medicine.”

“Do you use it so?”

“In very small quantities, and with great care. But yes; it has its uses – not least, by convincing one’s patients that they have indeed swallowed medicine. That, often, is half the battle.”

He recalled John saying as much, and clenched his fists against the pain of memory. With an effort, he steadied his voice. “And had you prescribed such a medicine for your brother?”

“Save in emergencies, I do not treat my family.” 

He could have kissed her. If Lemberger were not her patient, she could speak more freely about what she knew or surmised of his medical history.

He pictured Marie, holding her hands beneath the Turkey shawl, squirrel-like below her chin, and phrased his next question with care.

“Had you any reason to suspect that your brother might have been in some doubts about his ability to perform his husbandly duties? Or that someone might have persuaded Marie that this was a risk?”

“Oh.” Sarai sounded as if she had bitten into a lemon. “A few weeks ago – perhaps a month before the marriage – I caught Catherine reading one of those awful handbills quacks push into your hand at fairs. You know the kind of thing I mean.”

“I do.” His mind drifted, unstoppably, to the late unlamented Dr Shlessinger, of Vienna. “I trust Catherine did not.”

“I am glad to say she was most perplexed by the whole thing. Though I would rather face the assembled ranks of the rabbis of Salonika at their most disputatious than find myself having to parry _those_ questions again. Especially the ones having regard to _noses_. But when I asked her where she’d got it, she said she’d picked it up from the bank of the river, when she and Veronica had been off mushrooming. I supposed some traveller had dropped it crossing the bridge. But there is, of course, another explanation.”

“The handbill, I take it, offered divers sovereign cures for the privy ills of man?”

“And woman, likewise,” Sarai agreed. “But I remind you my brother’s symptoms were not those of cantharides or ergot, nor yet of yellow orpiment. And Nux Vomica is unsuited for widespread use in quack remedies. Quite apart from anything else, it is costly. Nor is it something one not familiar with apothecaries and their suppliers would find it easy to procure, not in a country district.”

“Which would seem to rule out any of the servants. Or – forgive me – your niece Naomi. Quite so. But –”

He broke off and turned at a noise from the corner of the cellar. The thick, encompassing blackness had been broken by a line of light; a line no thicker than the breadth of a bit of string, but a life-line nevertheless. He caught Sarai’s arm, directing her attention to it.

As soon as the line had widened to a ribbon Sherlock moved cat-like towards it. He knelt and reached out, grasping the edge of what turned out to be a trap-door, flipping it back abruptly. Light rushed into the cellar. It was only a lantern with a single candle within, but it hit his light-starved eyes with the ferocity of the noontide sun.

“Oh!” said a very put-out young voice. “You spotted me.”

“Catherine!” Sarai’s exclamation saved Sherlock the trouble of working out which of the little girls this was. Since their father’s death they had been creeping around like woe-begone little ghosts, too cast down to exchange more than monosyllables with anyone. Sherlock had not made any effort to distinguish between them.

Catherine pulled herself fully through the trapdoor with a practised wriggle which told Sherlock it was not the first time she had travelled this route. 

“Do you need anything to eat? Naomi thought you’d be starving.” She held out a linen bundle. In the lantern light it could be seen that her dress was soaked to well above the knee, splashed with mud and torn. 

“Later,” Sherlock murmured, on his knees besides the hole, having commandeered the lantern. Sarai, with less restraint, had the linen parcel open and was wolfing down the bread and cold meat it contained.

The lid of the trapdoor had been covered with a thick layer of plaster, cunningly rendered with dirt and paint to make it indistinguishable from the flagged floor of the cellar. He noted, too, that the lines whitewashed onto the floor, to guide cellar men in placing barrels, carefully skirted the fake flag. The hole itself led straight down with handholds carved into the living rock. The candlelight being too dim to allow him to see how far down it went, he dropped a pebble and heard it ‘clink’ almost immediately.

He knew at once what he was looking at. The three kingdoms had, over the years, fought hard to hold themselves apart from the great forces threatening to crush them on all sides: the Sultan to the East, the Emperor to the North and the Pope across the narrow seas. 

Should invaders come – as they had from the dawn of time – they could never be defeated by force of numbers. But they could be beaten back by luck and care and persistence: by daggers in the dark and rumours on the wind, and by picked bands of warriors assembling in secret to plot each daring coup.

In centuries past, limestone outcrops, riven with tunnels and caves, had been a favoured site to place manors such as this one. 

But the European Powers had, for eighty years or more, neglected the three kingdoms in favour of bigger aims. The hidden places had fallen into disuse, save for occasional contraband. Often even the memory of them had passed out of knowledge.

One of Sherlock’s minor amusements on journeys such as these had been to guess where such secret spots might be located. There would be clues in the changing vegetation showing the rock type beneath, in place-names, in slight oddities about the placing of outbuildings or barns.

Had he approached this house in daylight, or been less preoccupied in his time since, he might have anticipated there being something of the sort.

“Well?” Sarai demanded. “What are we waiting for? We should be off.” 

She gestured at the trapdoor. 

Catherine drew her brows together. “Aunt Sarai, I should warn you, it gets awfully narrow. There’s a bit where you have to get down and crawl, really low. And the stream’s running very high; it almost knocked me off my feet. Father made us promise not to come through until at least two days after a big storm and I thought he was just fussing, but he really wasn’t.”

“It would be as well if we waited for the water to subside further, then,” Sherlock said, easily. 

“Wait? Why wait?” 

From the tightness in Sarai’s tone, Sherlock guessed she was imagining all sorts of catastrophes, everything from Catherine’s absence being noticed upstairs to Sir Giles electing to come down to the cellar to gloat at his prisoners. 

“Well, for a start, we must consider not merely the advantage of running away – which are obvious – but of where we should run to. We would not get far in open country without horses, and stealing horses carries its own risks. Also, I presume, Mistress Catherine, the household has only just retired to bed?”

The little girl nodded, open-mouthed, though the deduction was a trivial one.

“Well then. Let us give them time to get thoroughly asleep before making our move. In the mean time, Mistress Catherine, satisfy my curiosity. This trapdoor has been recently refashioned. How long ago did your father learn of the tunnel? It was not something he was told of when buying the manor?”

She pouted. “ _We_ found it.” 

She and her sister. One worry the less, then.

“Yes, of course you did. This summer? You and your sister were out wandering almost every day.”

“ _She_ kept coming here. She and her horrible father,” Catherine said. “She didn’t want to see us and we didn’t want to see her.”

“An entirely understandable reluctance. On your part, I mean. So, after few stiff meetings, mainly taken up with criticisms on your appearance, manners and standards of performance on the – what instrument is it that you are required to torment?”

“The clavichord,” Sarai said. “And Catherine and her sister perform very creditably for –” She came to a halt, as if aware that not even a physician’s practised smoothing of a painful truth would get her over the next hurdle. “It is difficult to procure competent music teachers so far from the city, and the instrument is sadly in need of tuning.”

“Quite so. And I doubt that tow-haired nincompoop could tell good music from bad, in any event.”

From Catherine’s expression _that_ had hit the right note. He continued smoothly on.

“So, by way of a kindly conspiracy between your father, your older sister and his cook, you two were given bread and cheese or whatever else might be portable and told to make yourself scarce until dusk. Which you interpreted as an invitation to wander as far around the district as possible.”

“It’s almost as if you’d been there,” Sarai observed.

He winked at her across Catherine’s head. “I might have been somewhere similar, once. You were accompanied by your dog, Barnard. Your father may have been indulgent, but he was not a fool. There are wild boars in these woods. One day, while the three of you wandered up in the hills above and behind the house, Barnard started some game bird or animal –”

Catherine crossed herself. “It was a hare.” Her eyes were round with terror.

“A hare. Quite so. You lost sight of Barnard as he coursed it. You called, but he did not return. You and your sister became frantic, running everywhere, calling his name. Then you heard his bark – but it was coming from deep underground. Guided by the noise he was making, you eventually found a narrow slit in the rocks, the entrance to a cave –”

“Stop, sir!” Catherine was visibly shivering; Sarai put an arm round her, her eyes rebuking Sherlock above the girl’s head.

“I am no warlock, Mistress Catherine,” Sherlock said. “I observe and I draw conclusions; I hear things, I remember them and I make connections. There is nothing supernatural in it. If the mass of men were not credulous fools, those who use the same techniques to pass themselves off as wizards and sorcerers would be much shrunken in the belly.”

“You believe tales of witchcraft must always be false?” Sarai enquired.

“I have never seen or heard of a reputed instance which cannot be explained by applying the tenets of natural philosophy. Also, by presuming humans are gullible idiots.”

“Master Buccafusca is a wizard,” Catherine asserted.

The ring of absolute conviction in the little girl’s voice caught Sherlock’s attention. “Your evidence for that proposition, Mistress Catherine?”

“Village rumour,” Sarai said. “He is not a popular man. He is a foreigner and a scholar. As you may have noticed, neither of those characteristics endear one to the locals. Ever since he came here, all sorts of tales have circulated about him.”

Catherine jutted her lower lip. “He _is_ a wizard. I know it.”

Sarai frowned. “Listen, Catherine, so you can learn how foolish tales start, and so be armoured against gossip for the future.” 

Sherlock raised his hand. “A moment. How do you know any of this?”

“My brother was not a fool, Master Altamount.” 

At the use of the past tense Catherine hiccuped out a broken sob, and Sarai’s arm around her shoulders tightened. “Me, too, little one,” she whispered into the child’s hair. 

With an awkward duck of his chin, Sherlock acknowledged the point.

“May I proceed? Naturally, when he purposed taking Master Buccafusca into his household, he made all proper enquiries.” Her eyes gleamed for a moment in the candlelight. “My brother’s correspondence is wide, and he is owed many debts, not all of them in money. I’ll lay odds Master Buccafusca is in ignorance even now of how much my brother learned about him.”

Something twisted inside Sherlock’s head, like the start of one of those headaches which came with flashing lights. Something – the genesis of a thought. If only he could seize onto it, and hold it.

“Go on.”

“Master Buccafusca’s family is an old one, and once very powerful, but his is the junior branch and in any event the family influence has much declined from what it once was.”

“Backed the wrong politicians or the wrong horses?” 

Sarai shrugged. “Who knows? But they must have done it thoroughly. Master Buccafusca could only pursue a degree at the University of Bologna by acting as servitor to a wealthier student.” 

“That must have been a trial, to someone of his temperament.”

“Undoubtedly. Although –” Sarai’s voice acquired a sardonic edge. “His pride may have been wounded, but at least he was allowed to attend, a privilege denied to many of us.”

“I take your point,” Sherlock said. “Did Master Buccafusca?”

She snorted. “It would seem he did not. He was engaged as Catherine and Veronica’s tutor, as well as as chaplain, yet a few weeks ago he told my brother that he’d taught them all the book-learning it was seemly for women to know, and they’d be better off put to dairying and attending to their needles. But, at all events, his poverty compared to his patron and the other feckless gentlemen in his class rankled. He and two other students, similarly situated, began a quest for the philosopher’s stone.”

“Not a quest likely to endear them to the University authorities,” Sherlock observed. “Wherever in the world they may reside, fellows of colleges do so _hate_ loud explosions and noxious fumes in their vicinity.”

“Should I ask you how you came by that knowledge?” Sarai enquired demurely.

“Better not. So, how did his quest end?”

“Better for Master Buccafusca than for his two co-seekers. Come the day they had planned to test their new compound, the stars being in alignment, they assembled at the appointed place. He did not join them. Perhaps they planned to steal a march on him, or maybe his tutor delayed him. Whichever it was, he escaped the explosion which left one student dead and the other so torn and twisted his life was for months despaired of.”

“I expect that one – the second one – will have been the crooked man,” Catherine said. 

Sherlock crossed the cellar and knelt down next to her, waving Sarai to silence. He knew little about children, but _all_ about witnesses.

“ _Tell me_ about the crooked man.”

“That was how we knew Master Buccafusca was a wizard in truth,” Catherine confided. “It was just after Ascension Day. Mistress Bianca, in the village, had said there was a beggar in the district, who halted on two sticks and whose face looked like he’d been through the fires of hell. Nica and me were terrified we’d meet him. And we were coming back through the woods one evening, and we did see someone on sticks, hobbling along the road. So we crouched down behind the wall – we feared Barnard would give us away, but he was just as good as gold – and just as the crooked man was about to walk past we heard Master Buccafusca’s voice. He must have come out of the woods on the other side of the road. We were going to make ourselves known to him, but before we could the crooked man said, ‘So you came, after all.’”

“So they had arranged the meeting? Are you sure what you heard?”

Catherine stuck her chin out. “Definitely. Because then, Master Buccafusca said, ‘They told me you had died.’ And the crooked man said – his voice was a sort of horrible wheeze – ‘That man did. See what returned in his place.’ And then Master Buccafusca sort of gasped – Nica and me thought, when we talked about it later, that perhaps the crooked man had dropped his hood and shown his face. And then Master Buccafusca said, ‘Why have you come? I can do nothing for you’ and the crooked man said, ‘How odd, because I can do much for you. _Exemplum_ , I can save your body from the flames which await confessed and proven sorcerers – were you to give me solid reasons to show you had repented of your youthful sins.’ And then they must have walked away, because we couldn’t hear any more.” 

“Solid reasons?” 

Sherlock was not aware he had spoken aloud until he saw Catherine and Sarai’s faces. So Master Buccafusca had been subject to an extortionist. It was not true, as conventional wisdom had it, that men in such straits were capable of anything. Rather, Sherlock had found, their entire conception of their own limits became so fundamentally disordered that it became impossible for anyone, including the victim, to know what they were or were not capable of any more. Which, in the current situation, was of the utmost significance.

Sarai, plainly, was not thinking about that aspect.

“Catherine, why did you or Veronica not tell your father of this? Or your sister? Or me?”

“Aunt Sarai, they were wizards.” Catherine’s words had the irrefutable logic of childhood. Nevertheless, there was something about her manner – 

Sherlock fixed her with the glare which had always proved so efficacious in converting part truths into whole in the past.

“And?”

She shifted uncomfortably, but her lips remained resolutely shut. Sherlock raised an eyebrow, by way of increasing the pressure, and she broke.

“It was _that_ day, Aunt Sarai. When we got home she was there _and_ her horrible father _and_ the notary. And she looked at us both like – like Ruth looks at Barnard when he’s been rolling in something horrible and comes into the kitchen. And then Papa told us they were betrothed and we were to go upstairs and make ourselves presentable for the feast. And after that he started being ill, and Naomi and Ruth told us we weren’t to trouble him until he was better, and then he didn’t _get_ better. He was almost too ill to rise from bed even on his wedding day, and _she_ was always there. And, Aunt Sarah, you know how thick she’s always been with Master Buccafusca.”

“He came on Sir Giles’s original recommendation,” Sarai said, looking at Sherlock. “I believe his mother is some family connection. And, since the Vernons have some quarrel with the parish priest, he is Marie’s confessor.”

“ _Is_ he indeed? And you say, Mistress Catherine, your father’s illness came on within a day – or even less – of this encounter you witnessed in the lane?”

“Yes. So it _was_ witchcraft,” Catherine said. 

Sherlock, his imagination on fire, saw it all rolled out plain before him. 

“On the contrary. If Master Buccafusca indeed had the powers he sought, he would have nothing to fear from the secular authorities. He could make himself invisible, or bid demons carry him to Cathay. ‘The crooked man’ played upon what he had sought to become, not what he was.” 

Every scrap of evidence tended the same way. Put on the spot, in a place he thought himself secure, Master Buccafusca had panicked. His only hope of meeting the extortioner’s demands was from his employer’s coffers, but Sherlock himself had heard Master Lemberger’s barbed jibe at alchemy. To confess anything further – to put himself within the power of someone he considered less than dirt – unthinkable!

Embezzlement, then. But Master Lemberger’s book-keeping was impeccable. And so, step by step, Master Buccafusca had put into place his scheme (How had the ‘crooked man’ been persuaded to wait? Perhaps, on the basis that to swoop now would be to kill the bull-calf, which would with time and careful nurture prove itself sire of a line of strapping progeny.)

First, render Lemberger frail and insensible by exposure to the metallic poisons. Easily achieved; as a churchman Master Buccafusca could plausibly claim devotion as an excuse for not sharing a poisoned dish, or eating only sparingly of it. He might with equal plausibility tell the palsied functionary who – on the occasions he was well enough – did the duties of butler at the manor that lead crystal was cleaned best by using lead shot and a tablespoon of brandy. 

As Lemberger’s health failed, so, doubtless, had Master Buccafusca increased his depredations into his accounts. Yet he must have known that he was walking the narrowest of edges. Master Lemberger would not postpone his reckoning indefinitely, however ill he was. And then had come on the scene one Master Altamount of Glasstown, a disinterested party with a clear palate to detect poison and a trained eye for a ledger. He recalled that odd exchange with Lemberger, when Master Buccafusca had asked him to take a book of devotions to his lady. A pre-arranged signal, no doubt, that this was the night she should give her husband the medicine which would allow him to father a son on his new bride. Naturally, given the horrifying sequel, Mistress Marie could be relied on to get rid of the remaining medicine. If she accused Master Buccafusca, she risked standing condemned alongside him; given her dependence on him and her limited understanding, it would be easy for him to convince her some error in dispensing on her part had turned a wholesome medicine into a poison.

Each link in the chain of reasoning held firm. It only remained for him to prove it.

“Who else in this district is a magistrate?”

Sarai wrinkled her nose. “The nearest is Master Frankland. But the man is five parts mad. He sues everyone – half his fortune is gone already in lawsuits and he has three more on at the moment.”

“Any against Sir Giles?”

“Two out of the three, but –”

“Better and better. Mistress Catherine, it is plain you know this tunnel of old. Down it, now, and find your sister Naomi. Tell her to come and meet us in the cave. Tell her to dress for a respectable visit; we are off to visit Master Frankland.”

“Naomi? Why?”

“She represents the interests of three quarters of the legatees. If Marie were to be found guilty of her husband’s murder, her share, too, would pass to your nieces. That, I fancy, is the kind of argument likely to appeal to Master Frankland.”

“But Marie – she may have been a little fool, but I don’t think for a moment she was trying to kill my brother.”

“Probably not, but she’ll not confess to her dealings with Master Buccafusca unless she feels the breath of the executioner on her neck. And husband-poisoners burn as surely as do reputed sorcerers.”

Even in the dim light of the wine cellar Sherlock caught Sarai’s cold glare and knew he had gone too far. There was an echo of things long ago in that unsmiling integrity. Given the last few days, he found it intolerable. He rose to his feet.

“Our own necks hang by a thread; this is scarcely the time to be nice. Mistress Catherine, will you lead on?”


	5. Chapter 5

The tunnel had proved no worse than Sherlock expected, if it no better. He and Sarai cooled their heels (rather literally; the stream had been running so fast that he acquired a new respect for the child, coming through it earlier when it had been higher yet) while Catherine went to seek her sister.

Naomi, unexpectedly, arrived with Ruth, both of them well wrapped up and carrying bundles, which included fresh clothing for the erst-while prisoners. To his surprise, once he and Sarai were looking as respectable as could be contrived in the circumstances, Ruth made it clear she proposed to accompany them to Master Frankland’s.

“Jacopo won’t say anything, and as for those two men Sir Giles left on the premises, well, I gave them a good dinner and plenty of wine to it – and, Mistress Sarai, I took the liberty of dosing them with the last of the opium. They’ll not rise early, after that.”

“Ruth, I trust you were careful –” Sarai sounded strained, and Sherlock could hardly blame her. It would be piquant – to say the least – if they had inadvertently managed to kill two men by poison in an effort to escape an unfounded charge of poisoning.

Ruth snorted. “Not to worry. Both were snoring when I left, but I’ve heard worse from them in ale. But you’ll need me at Master Frankland’s. His housekeeper – well, there’s those who’ll say she’s more, but I say live and let live and don’t go poking your nose where it isn’t invited – she’s not the woman to let just anyone in, ’specially after dark, and I can’t blame her. But we worked side by side when they had the enteric in the village last summer and I trust her and she knows my knock. So I’m coming with you.”

Frankland’s residence, two miles away, appeared to be a chaotic, generous, sprawling farmstead, with only the last vestiges of the defensive walls which had once been de riguer in those parts. 

“Stand back, the rest of you,” Ruth whispered as she rapped out a precise pattern of knocks on the door. “And keep your heads covered. Leave it to me to explain.”

The woman who unlocked the postern (Frankland’s mistress in truth, in that position for more than a decade, he more anxious to regulate matters by matrimony than she) looked concerned but unsurprised to see them. Clearly the cooperation between the two households was of long standing.

“We’ve matter of much moment to put before Master Frankland at once,” Ruth said, without preamble. “And sore need of a quiet place to do it, with none but the two of you knowing we’ve troubled the household.” She leant over and whispered a few more words in the housekeeper’s ear. The woman’s eyes widened, but she showed no other signs of shock.

“You’d best come in. You two –” The housekeeper gestured at Sarai and Sherlock. “Don’t you say a word until you’re spoken to, and keep your heads down. Wait here.”

She showed them into a small parlour, returning a few moments later with slices of fruitcake, crumbly, salty sheep’s cheese and a decanter of wine which stood in relation to Sir Giles’s gift as the pure spring of the uplands does to foetid swamp water. 

They were permitted a blessed half turn to eat and recruit themselves before Master Frankland was shown in. He was an excessively short man, wearing an absurd skull cap with a silk tassel, and an elaborate dressing gown of damascened brocade with a pattern of fighting dragons. Wild greying curls swirled around his choleric, rounded face.

“Well then, well then. Who do we have here?” Frankland had a deep, booming voice, quite jarring when set against his tiny form.

Before any of the rest of them could move, Naomi stepped forward and sank to her knees. “Master Frankland, may I consign these into your possession?”

She reached into the bag which she had carried from the manor and produced four substantial leather-bound ledgers.

“And these are?” 

She ducked her head submissively. “Master Frankland, they are the records of my father’s business. From hints he dropped before his death, I collect he suspected Master Buccafusca may have been – have been presuming on his frailness. From what I have been able to discern, with my poor wit, I believe my father’s suspicions were but a shadow of the true position. Master Frankland, I am executor and guardian for my sisters, whose inheritance the manor is. I cannot stand by and see fraud done upon their futures. You are, I collect, a man knowledgeable in the law.”

“No man more so – as your late father well knew! I’m surprised you came to me, given I whipped him so soundly in the only case we ever fought against each other. Also, you hussy, why are you worrying about trifles such as embezzlement when his killers remain unhung?”

Sherlock and Sarai, standing at the back of the room, their heads swathed in their cloaks, tried to give the impression of taking a purely scholarly interest in this question.

“Master Frankland!” Naomi almost threw herself forward at his feet. “You _knew_ my father. He could not rest easy in his grave, did he think me remiss in protecting his estate. There is _no_ service I could do him which better honours his memory.”

A slight smile touched Frankland’s lips, indicating a sally which had found its mark. Emboldened, Naomi pressed on.

“Besides, should Master Buccafusca be an embezzler, what more like than he is the poisoner also? Far more likely that my father had but _one_ criminal in his household, who killed to cover his tracks, than to credit my aunt, who has devoted all her life to curing the sick, and Master Altamount, whom we never saw before this week, with such a wicked deed.”

Frankland inclined his head; the tassel on his skull cap swung.

“There is something in that, girl. You show more perception than I would have credited.” 

Naomi remained in her submissive pose, though Ruth, standing against the wall next to Frankland’s housekeeper, looked as if she were restraining herself from treating him to a piece of her mind. Even as Sherlock reached this conclusion, the housekeeper’s hand stretched out and circled Ruth’s wrist in a firm grasp.

“Remain completely quiet, everybody. I’m thinking.” Frankland drew his hand slowly down over his chin in an attitude suggestive of deep contemplation. After a moment he looked up, fixing Sherlock with a beady stare.

“We have not been introduced, Master Altamount, but you will find I am not a man who can easily be fooled.”

Sherlock inclined his head. “Sir. Your reputation runs ahead of you, and everything I have perceived since entering your house confirms it.”

Frankland puffed up like a bantam cock. “You needn’t think you can get round me by flattery. I’m not proposing to ask you how you got here – I’m not a fool, and only a fool asks a question when knowing the answer will do him no good. But I will ask why you are not fled? You could have been half way to the border by dawn, had you not spent your time turning south to converse with me.”

Sherlock cocked his head on one side. “A little less than half way, surely, given the need to divert around the Primontel bridge?”

At this reference, Frankland’s face turned dusky plum colour. “I told the sessions five years ago of Vernon’s neglect, yes, when I brought suit against that prating windbag, and yet the fools dismissed my suit as _damnum sine inuria_ and _nisi ex futura causa_. Had that rogue done what he ought, when he ought, there’d be two widows fewer in this district, and that’s before you calculate the harm to trade by the bridge being out. Harm to his own market tithes, as much as anything, the short-sighted blunderer. But you deflect me, you deflect me, sir! I’ll have none of it. Give me a straight tale. Why did you not run when you had the chance?”

Each line of Sherlock’s body was carefully composed to project sincerity, tinged with a certain consciousness of personal rectitude. Master Altamount, he reflected with an inner flash of amusement, was not without courage, but might be something of a prig on prolonged acquaintance.

“Because, sir, neither I nor Mistress Benveniste have done anything wrong. Were we to run, it would have been as good as a confession of guilt. Furthermore, it would leave a most dangerous man in a position of influence over one who – I would not presume to criticise one of rank, sir, were it not that I perceive you already near to the heart of the matter – who is not of strong understanding, and who has not your wariness of flatterers. Buccafusca has already a strong hold over the widow, and his influence over Sir Giles will increase immeasurably following these events.”

“A hold over the widow?” Frankland collapsed into guffaws: paroxysms so violent that his housekeeper’s hand moved towards her pocket, presumably to check her smelling bottle was on hand. “You had the line right close up until that moment, but lost it on a false scent at the last. Trust me, should Master Buccafusca go to forswear his vows, it will not be by paddling in _that_ river. Fowl or fur, sir, not fish for that one, even in Lent.”

Besides him, he could feel Sarai stiffen. Picking his words carefully, Sherlock said, “There are more ways of extending influence than carnally, sir.” 

Taking Frankland’s absence of interruption for encouragement, he sketched out the story of the crooked extortionist, followed with his and Sarai’s theory of Nux Vomica and the medicine given by Master Buccafusca to Marie, to be deployed at his signal. He grew animated; he gestured with his hands in the air and traced figures with his fingertip on the table, until Sarai kicked him hard on the ankle bone and he looked up to see Naomi looking grey.

“An interesting tale, Master Altamount,” Frankland said, when he had finished. “But how to prove it?”

“Look in the ledger,” Sherlock said. He gestured to Naomi. “The most recent, please. The one showing household outgoings from Ascension Day onwards. You need not go earlier than that. But Nux Vomica is costly, and I imagine Master Buccafusca will have had to send to Glasstown for it. The individual items may have been disguised, but a large sum paid to an apothecary will stand out. Mistress Naomi; you had control of the family medicine chest until your father’s marriage, did you not?”

“And afterwards,” Naomi said. “It was not a responsibility Marie wished to take over, save in name, and my father told me I should continue. But save for staples such as opium, its contents are for the most part prepared by Ruth and I, in our own still room. We do not order in from Glasstown; should I need anything which cannot be procured locally I send an express to Sarai, who knows where the purest and most reliable drugs can be obtained.”

“Of course. And, as a physician, at the most favourable rates: doubtless a point that was not lost on the late Master Lemberger. So _any_ sums paid to an apothecary are inherently suspect.”

With that prompting, it did not take long to find the order in question. Frankland made a note of the apothecary’s name and direction in Glasstown, and remarked he would send an express messenger at once, to confirm what had in fact been in the package. 

“Might I trouble you, sir, to include a message also to a certain address in Colavun? Your messenger must change horses there, and I would have my principals informed of my plight.” 

At Frankland’s nod, Sherlock scribbled down a message, using a particular code-word. The man in Colavun was indeed the North Angrian agent for Ferdinand _Fratres_ , along with several other mercatile houses of the capital, but it was not the only allegiance he owed. Whether Mycroft could or would do anything might be a moot point, but at least he could not reproach Sherlock for not having given him the chance.

The messenger despatched, they turned to a more detailed consideration of the evidence. The perusal of the ledgers revealed much to fuel the suspicion of embezzlement, and that in Master Buccafusca’s own hand. Lemberger could not but have discovered it had he had the full use of his faculties, and nor could the Glasstown merchant, Altamount, whom he had asked to serve as his amanuensis in that regard. Master Buccafusca might have sought to make himself master of the dark arts, but the mysteries of double-entry bookkeeping it would seem had eluded him. His subterfuges were but poor things to the scrutiny of trained eyes.

Thin fingers of dawn were beginning to stretch into the room by the time they finished. Frankland sat up, looking cherubic and revived, like a man risen from nine hours of blameless rest.

“I think we have him. Confronted with this, I think the craven rogue will crack. If we could but lay hands upon the crooked man – I shall set my beaters on the task, and tell them to enlist my tenants in the search. I doubt the rogue will have travelled far, not when his schemes are so near to consummation. Marie Lemberger lies at her father’s house at present, does she not?”

“She has expressed an intention never to sleep under the manor’s roof again,” Naomi said.

“Excellent! It means we can take the two birds separately, and not let each of ’em know what the other has told us. Master Buccafusca first, before he goes to celebrate early Mass. Then, when the widow has had enough time to become uneasy at his absence and messengers sent to him have not returned, or returned only with uncertain and disquieting tidings, then I shall arrive with a formal escort and question the lady.”

“Her father will not permit you to do so.” Naomi was tight-lipped. 

“Her father has nothing to say on the matter. She’s a widow; she’s _mulier emancipata_ , whosoever’s roof she lies under. Furthermore, I’m a magistrate of the district, before whom _causa petendi demonstratus erat_. And a question whether she authorised Master Buccafusca to purchase Nux Vomica is as relevant to an enquiry into irregular accounting as it is to poisoning, and it’s not my affair which she takes it as.”

He rubbed his hands together with a palpable air of glee. Naomi and Sarai’s faces looked greyer than ever in the wan lamplight. It occurred to Sherlock that, little as they liked Marie, she was their kin by marriage, and to this family such ties were all but sacred.

“One other thing.” The note in Frankland’s voice sounded a warning bell; Sherlock’s head jerked up.

“Yes?”

“If we are to do this matter by the law, then within the law we must remain. _Ex turpi cause non oritur acta._ You will have to return unseen to that place from which you were delivered, by whatever means seem good to you. Otherwise you’ll be dismissed as fugitives and outlaws, and all your good reasoning fall on hardened ears and your solid proofs left to whistle down the wind.”

“But –”

Sherlock raised his hand, cutting short Naomi’s cry of distress.

“We understand. We trust in the rightness of our cause, and submit ourselves to stand or fall by the law’s dictates. We will hold ourselves ready to answer its summons, whenever that may come.”

He had thought Naomi look grey before. Now, he would not swear to ever having seen a living person with so corpse-like a hue. Nevertheless, her eyes blazed with a fanatic gleam in that drawn face.

“Trust us. We won’t let you down. _We won’t_.” 

* * *

Sarai composed herself in the corner of the cellar. By the thin light of the candle, he could see her face looking strained and weary.

“You don’t doubt Master Frankland’s ability to procure our release?” Sherlock enquired.

“I wish I could be out there and doing myself.”

“Me also. But since it cannot be so, we will have to amuse ourselves with tales, like benighted travellers waiting for the road to clear. You first, Mistress Benveniste. Tell me about Vannstown. The histories of the wars between Gondal and Gaaldine contain many accounts of triumphs and catastrophes for each side, but Vannstown alone, I think, claims credit for having been both, for each army in turn. How did it look from where you were standing?”


	6. Chapter 6

From Sarai Benveniste, physician, of Glasstown to John Watson, physician, of Gondal.

Yr last received safe, much thanks. The ills of the season more severe than I have yet known: yr febrifuge has provd its worth already & April barely out. But _magister meo_ – if I might venture the smallest of corrections to one whose learning so greatly exceeds my own – ferns bear fronds not leaves. 

The land in heavy sorrow for death of Princess Dow. & my heart oppressd the more as the dissolution of hr betrothal to his Gr. of Gondal means I shall not see you in Glasstown this Sept. & so am forcd to commit to paper that I would & with more freedom confide _in personam_. Yr delicate enquiry re _family_ & yr kind condolences for loss shews my late troubles have reached yr ears. Happily all now resolvd. Mast. Buccafusca confessd he plannd to scapegoat me from 1st & doubt Mast. Frankland wd have taken my part save for mischief’s sake, if that. I wd have been good as condemnd but trade of murder more like apothecary’s than I hd thought: the nicest of balances required. By inspiration born in the inst. Mast B. lookd to accuse also Mast. Altamount (wine mcht of F&F Bros, a stranger chance-met) & so o’reachd & brought down all. _Magister meo_ from you of all I can not disguise: I still dream of nooses  & cellars & even in this sickliest & most stinking season Glasstown’s free air smells pure as snow.

I owe safety, reputation, liberty & all to Mast. A’s wits & my fam.’s constancy & courage. Mast. A. stands out like a white crow in black flock & has a wandering foot – like others I have known – and in that at least wine trade suits him well. Shd he stray N. wch I think not unlike I commend him to you as my friend & greatest of benefactors & doubt not you will find in him all that **and more** [double underlined]. 

One unalloyd delight: my nieces are come to live with me, the manor being sold (we pity the purchaser caught between such neighbours! Should he show an instant’s civility to F., Marie and Sir G.will deem it mortal insult & F. is doubtless already prep’d to bring suit for any cause or none.) R. & Jac. included, we are now a household of 8 & of consid. consequence. So _magister meo_ we can feast  & house you as you deserve when next you come to Glasstown. Pray it may be soon.  
Yr loving friend 

**Author's Note:**

> Details with respect to the Shabtai Zvi affair are  
> [ here ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi)


End file.
